Ekart finds a shortcut via third-party tie-ups

Ekart, the captive logistics arm of India's biggest online retailer Flipkart, is now reaping the benefits of its efforts to lower cost of delivery and improve efficiency through tie-ups with external clients.

“Our efficiencies have improved to high double digits in the past six months and in the case of large appliances, it is between 40 to 50%,“ said Rohit Sharma, vice-president, who leads operations and design at Ekart.“In the past six to eight months, we have signed on clients such as Tata CLiQ and Voonik for Ekart's services to external clients.“ The company also signed up Adidas recently as an external client to manage shipments from the brand's online channel.

The change in strategy has been in the works since January , coinciding with multiple leadership changes in the vertical. Ekart CEO Saikiran Krishnamurthy made way for chief operating officer Nitin Seth to take charge of the vertical, and more recently , Seth's exit led to Ekart's management reporting to Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy directly .

The marketplace, which is planning to enter the fast-moving consumer goods and grocery business by July , also plans to look at adding specific fulfilment centres for the category at a city level, starting with its pilot city of Bengaluru. “We have increased our captive manpower by 1020% since the start of the year and every new facility requires additional people. For slotted deliveries such as grocery , we already have manpower which is used to this kind of delivery timeline are now working with slotted deliveries for furniture.In June alone we have added over 300 pin codes to Ekart,“ said Sharma.

Ekart covers more than 6,500 pin codes at present and had close to 20,000 people employed on the supply side with the company , with a view to ramp up capacities ahead of the annual Big Billion Days festive sale.

Competing marketplace Amazon India has also committed Rs 207 crore, ET had earlier reported, to increase its network and capacity as part of Amazon Transport Services, its logistics unit.